The world war in photographs

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English

Soldiers took pictures of their life away from home. Among these 50 personal photographs from World War One are smiling troops at the food dispatch and those washing their clothes in a bath tub. Some are posed, like the men lying in the mud beside their bikes, where the photographer must have been positioned above them, in clear view of the firing line. There is a piano in one image, but it has evidently done little to cheer the soldiers, their faces devoid of expression.

Ways of writing and thinking about World War One have developed and changed over the past 100 years. Yohann le Tallec examines these differences in historical research and writing, focusing on the broad move away from military history towards an approach that places human beings at its centre.